It's not your fault

Over on BlueSky last night I dashed off a thought—the way you do!—and it seemed to strike a nerve. In the replies, people did what people typically do when a post reaches critical mass: the majority of folks were kind, thanking me for articulating something they felt but didn’t yet have the words for; and a smaller subset came looking to quibble, make pedantic arguments, and fight.

I’m not an attention-seeking writer—all that noise leaves me cold. I don’t need anyone’s praise; nor do I need anyone’s blame. I hit ‘send’ and the words become the readers’ to do with as they please.

Leave me out of it.

Last week I wrote about the value of writing to writers—reaching out to tell writers that their work has mattered to you. So how I can say “leave me out of it” but also that it feels nice to be acknowledged? Because 1) We’re all a heap of contradictions; but 2) more importantly, there’s a degree of intentionality at play in taking the time to think something through and write it down…versus the instant gratification of hitting ‘like’ on social media. I’m not denigrating that, mind you. In fact, I love instant gratification! Big fan! But it’s not quite the same.

Here are some things people quibbled with in my original skeet [is that what we’re really calling these things, BlueSky?]:

• the definition of a moral compass: 1) there isn’t such a thing; 2) there is such a thing but bad people have them too…but for those people they’re bad; and 3) everyone thinks their moral compass is truer than everyone else’s, which is really a combination of the first two.

• that I used the word pair “right now”: Oh, so you’re ignoring the people who have been fighting [insert injustice here] all along? You’re only talking to those privileged enough to just now be hurting/scared?

• people letting me know they don’t feel bad and have never hated themselves [Did I ever claim you did?!]

• people taking “all the time” literally instead of as an informal synonym for “often.”

• people telling me who and what I should hate instead.

• one gentleman claiming this was all a psy-op and we’d all better wake up before it’s too late.

I mostly ignore these responses, but I bring them up here to say to those of you who’d like to write for bigger audiences: expect a lot of nonsense. In your head, you might have an idealized version of what success looks like. Disabuse yourself of that. Success, friends, is the moment you have the thought and make it manifest on the page. Success is understanding the value of the activity as a process/discipline/practice regardless of what it yields.

Think of Rilke in Letters to a Young Poet:

This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse.

Now let me get back to where we started—that thought I dashed off last night that seemed to touch a nerve. I was thinking about a friend of mine who struggled terribly in her early years. A childhood of neglect and abuse landed her, as a teenager, in a residential treatment facility for people with behavioral problems. A huge part of her recovery was the realization—with the help of meds and group therapy—that she had subconsciously been blaming herself for all the trauma she’d endured. It was a way of reducing and simplifying her pain, like a math problem: I’m a bad person and deserve to feel this way. With no control over the awful things happening to her, she took control of what she could: the narrative in her mind. It didn’t matter that that narrative only inflicted more hurt. It was hers.

I was also thinking about the years my son suffered from an undiagnosed stomach ailment. He was an infant and cried nonstop. Shrieked. Squealed. Day and night. My wife and I took him to doctors who relentlessly gaslit us and wrote off our concerns as those of first-time parents.

Sometimes in those years, I’d see a pretty cloud in the sky and say fuck you to it. There wasn’t anything I didn’t hate. Myself included. Every choice I’d ever made to end up in such a wretched situation.

It wasn’t my friend’s fault. It wasn’t my fault.

In our currently political moment, even reading the news feels like being complicit in evil. Injustice is everywhere. The threats the most vulnerable among us live with (and have been living with!) grow more dangerous by the day. To witness a moment like this one is to be scarred by it.

[To my quibblers: Shouldn’t we have already woken up? Weren’t there other atrocities we should have had sympathy for? Sure. I guess so. Feel better? Feel morally superior? What’s it gotten you?]

What I’m saying is this: to pay attention to what’s happening right now is to encounter a suffocating helplessness. Even the small acts of resistance you practice in daily life (likely the big ones, too) may only barely nudge the dial toward justice. We may not live long enough to see things turn around.

But listen: It’s not your fault. Owning your little part in the story is all you have to do. Hold fast to that.

In my more vulnerable moments, yes, I said fuck you to some clouds—but I never stopped looking at the sky. It’s empty up there, and changing, filled with color, sometimes black. It’s like a mind emptying itself.

As usual, William Stafford says it better. Take his poem “Sky.” You can hear Naomi Shihab Nye read here:

The Sky

I like it with nothing. Is it
what I was? What I will be?
I look out there by the hour,
so clear, so sure. I could
smile, or frown—still nothing.
Be my father, be my mother,
great sleep of blue; reach
far within me; open doors,
find whatever is hiding; invite it
for many clear days in the sun.

When I turn away I know
you are there. We won’t forget
each other: every look is a promise.
Others can’t tell what you say
when it’s the blue voice, when
you come to the window and look for me.

Your word arches over
the roof all day. I know it
within my bowed head where
the other sky listens.
You will bring me
everything when the time comes.